


don't let the sun go down on you here

by slipstream



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Astronomy, Aziraphale has a hard time processing predestination, Caretaking, Crowley Has PTSD (Good Omens), Crowley has a hard time processing the not-end of the world, Dissociation, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Genderfluid Crowley (Good Omens), Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Memory Loss, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Non-Linear Narrative, Other, Post-Almost Apocalypse (Good Omens), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Drama, Stargazing, The Arrangement (Good Omens), Weddings, more or less, theoretical cosmology, they help each other through it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-18
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-10-20 22:20:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20682842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slipstream/pseuds/slipstream
Summary: It is twenty-five years until the end of the world.  Aziraphale sells a book and invites Crowley to a wedding.It is three hours until the end of the world.  In a bar somewhere in London, Crowley falls into a black, bottomless hole.It is ten seconds to the end of the world.  Aziraphale says something too horrible to repeat. Crowley trembles against the wet tarmac, stuck there by a gravity not of this world.It is some time after the not-end of the world.  Aziraphale holds him tightly by the hand.  Everything is going so terribly, terribly fast.(Listen:  Anthony Crowley has come unstuck in time.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The first time I watched episode 5, I just wanted to live in that aching, trembling high note at the end of "Somebody to Love" as Crowley drove hollow-eyed through the rain forever. This fic is my attempt to put that feeling into words.
> 
> General content warning: Characters experiencing dissociation/depersonalization/unreality, less than light-hearted canon-typical heavy alcohol use

It is the 25th of August, 2018. About half past two in the afternoon.

The world is ending. Has ended. Will end, soon. But not soon enough.

Crowley’s chest hurts. 

It’s a heavy, leaden sort of hurt, a hot ache just behind his sternum that reminds him of drowning. Or what he imagines drowning must be like. He’s never done it, personally. Seen it done, oh yes. Is well versed on the theory of it. The water starts on the outside, then rushes to the inside, pooling and pooling at the center of you until your belly is a great bloated stone or the small spaces of your lungs burst with the pressure of it all and then you sink and then you float and then whatever’s left still living still hungry in the water comes and pulls all the soft pieces from your bones. 

Crowley realizes, distantly, that he hasn’t been breathing. That’s no good. Humans tend to get twitchy, if his corporation doesn’t breathe. Maybe that’s why he feels so light-headed. Air isn’t something he technically _needs_, but after all these years of regular practice it’s something he’s gotten used to. Something he’s learned to draw comfort in. 

Crowley breathes. Smells smoke. The stale kind, from other people’s cigarettes. And beneath that, the less stale kind. The kind from…

Crowley stops breathing. 

There’s something sour in his mouth. 

His eyes are open. He is staring out a window. The sky beyond the window is grey. There are small drops of water gathering on the glass. There’s a tree just beyond the glass, a lean, barren-looking thing staked into the middle of the sidewalk like a warning, its silver-barked limbs naked of greenery and swaying in the rising wind.

It is starting to storm. 

Crowley’s chest hurts. Crowley’s eyes hurt. His jaw. The long sinew stretch of his back. 

He doesn’t know why. 

Crowley watches the grey tree bend and tremble in the grey wind and doesn’t breathe. His ears vibrate with the low rumble of distant thunder, or maybe it’s a closer, more human kind of mumble. There are people here, wherever here is. The familiar hum of their wantings wrap around him like a thick curtain of dark velvet. 

There’s another sound. Soft. Even. Unending. He can’t place it.

He looks down. Towards the source of the sound. Sees a pair of white hands against brownblack wood. Sees a glass in one of the hands. A bottle. Overlapping rings of water, where a glass has been set, and raised, set, and raised. 

Those hands must be his. Or the left one, at least. It’s wearing his watch. 

Crowley’s chest hurts. Crowley’s chest feels heavy. Crowley’s chest feels so light with smokesmell he might burst from it. Might fracture into a trillion glimmering sparkfires of light. Might collapse in and in and in back on himself until all that is left is a point of infinite density that swallows everything it touches.

His mouth is sour, sour.

He shuts his eyes. Opens them. There’s liquid in the glass. Dark. Swirling. Flecked with glimmers of fractured light, like distant stars.

The glass is empty. It feels heavy in his hand. Heavier than it should, empty as it is. 

He sets it down. Slow, careful. It rattles where he presses it against the wood.

The sour taste in his mouth is sharper. Hotter. The burn is old, familiar. It clings to his teeth, the soft parts of his mouth and throat. Spreads up through the hardslickwet of his palate to smolder in all the hollows of his skull. 

An old, old burn. Not the oldest. But familiar. Bearable.

Not like…

There’s liquid in the glass. Swirling. Like it hasn’t yet come to terms with the boundaries of its new reality.

Crowley raises the glass to his lips. Empties it with one long, numb swallow. Feels it settle the lower half of his corporation into the hard press of a wooden chair, the upper half draped haphazardly across the even harder jut of a table.

He is, he thinks after a long, sluggish moment, drunk.

He mulls this thought over. Passes it absently from hand to hand. Feels out its alien geometry. Its smoothcircle rim. Its weighted base. The thought is cold. Damp. It clinks as he rolls it between his slick palms. 

He tries to remember a time before he was drunk. 

Beyond the grey, dripping window, a warning crackle of white lightning.

The velvet curtain flutters. 

Something is peeking out at him from between the dark, billowing folds. Something too bright to behold. Something loud, and _hot_, with sharp, jagged edges. 

Crowley looks at the glass in his hand. 

The glass is empty. 

The glass stays empty. 

Crowley frowns. 

His arm lifts into the air. His wrist flicks. His fingers trace a blind, complicated gesture. 

He waits, hand suspended in space. His watch _tick, tick, ticks_ in his ear. Unrelenting. Unwavering. It is a very expensive watch. It can tell the time even in places where time is a weapon, where moments drag or rush as perversely as necessary. Where patience is a virtue taught on the dulled edge of a flaying knife. 

Crowley waits patiently. 

A dark, humanoid shadow forms in the hazy whitegreenblack of his peripheral vision. Crowley feels its eyes move over him. 

The shadow opens its mouth. Contracts its chest and moves its lips and jaw in the way humans do when they want to practice the gift of speech. The ticking of his watch is too loud for Crowley to make out the words. He closes his eyes. Flicks out his tongue. Flicks it in again so he can press the smellshape of their vibration against the roof of his mouth. 

_look it’s none of my business but_

_do you need me to call someone_

_I’ve got a number you can call if you need_

_if you’ve got nobody to call_

Crowley shakes his head. Feels the fingers of his raised hand clutch and clutch at empty air. His glass is empty. His chest is empty. The space folded small and secret between his atoms, the non-corporeal hollow where his Grace was torn out of him. The voids of himself he has spent six thousand years slowly filling with something _bright_ and _hot_ and _sharp_.

Empty.

_Empty_.

He shakes his head again. 

He can’t seem to _stop_ shaking.

The air vibrates, but there are no words in it to taste, this time. There’s a heavy clunk of glass being set on a wooden surface. A warm hand wraps around his clammy wrist, guides his groping fingers to the neck of a tall bottle. Crowley’s sour tongue flicks out reflexively. Wet. Desperate to burn. Flicks in.

The shadow retreats. Crowley’s other hand finds the base of the bottle, sliding along the raised paper edge of the label and the hard dip of its shoulder and over the trembling bumps of his knuckles until it finds the plastic ridges of the cap. 

_‘I suppose,’ _comes an echo from somewhere beyond the black curtain. _‘It would make more sense if I started at the beginning.’_

The curtain folds. The curtain unfolds. Tangled in the heavy fabric of wantings, Crowley glimpses a face, pale and radiant and blinding to behold. 

Crowley’s eyes open with a snap, but no ghost haunts the wooden chair on the other side of the table.

He is alone.

What little air was left in his lungs comes out in a wet, noisy burst. Crowley wrings and wrings his hands. 

The glass is full.

The glass is empty. 

The glass is full.

The glass is empty.

Crowley burns and burns and burns, but it isn’t enough to warm him.

Crowley floats. Crowley sinks. Slips over the event horizon of despair, and falls. 

The glass is full.

The glass is empty.

His watch _ticks_.

_Ticks_.

_Ticks…_


	2. Chapter 2

It is the 25th of August, 1993. Just before teatime. Twenty-five years, give or take an hour, until the end of the world. 

Crowley is still most of the way up a telephone pole when the first bolt of lightning hits. 

“_Shit!_” A wall of icy rain slams into him, instantly fogging his glasses. He drops his tool bag as the pole sways in the hurricane-force wind, tangling the wires overhead more effectively than he could ever hope, not that he has time to sulk about it when he’s scrabbling frantically for the next handhold. “Mary _fucking _Joseph—!”

A boom of thunder swallows the rest of the bless. Loud enough and trailing close enough behind the wicked fork of lightning still ghosting across his eyeballs that he looks up to the top of the telephone pole, down the ten feet left to go before his feet touch pavement, spares half a moment to think _Fuck it, I’ve fallen from higher_, and jumps.

The next bolt of lightning doesn’t hit the telephone pole, but it’s a near enough miss that he bites off the howl that wants very much to give voice to the pain shooting up both his buckling legs and connecting electric hot to his palms as he slams into the pavement and scrabbles frantically for his bag. There’s a ringing metal sound as some of his tools scatter. No time to gather them all together again. Each raindrop is like a bayonet, each clap of thunder like a mortar shell. Crowley pushes himself back onto his feet and makes a shaky, half-blind run for the Bentley. 

“Fuck!” He wretches the driver’s side door open. It’s a fight to keep the wind from tearing it off completely. 

“Shit!” He flings what’s left of his tool bag onto the front seat.

“_Christ!_” He flings himself in after and wrestles the door closed.

Inside the car, the storm is both muffled and somehow louder than ever. Crowley gasps for breaths he doesn’t need as the rain hammers furiously against the car roof. 

Cocooned in familiar leather and hand-stained wood accent panels, Crowley’s breathing slowly calms, though his hands still tremble as they wipe his sunglasses dry on a monogrammed handkerchief pulled from the ether. He scowls in distaste as he gets a clearer view of the red streaks his scraped hands have smeared across the otherwise pristine antique interior. 

_Out, damn spot_, he thinks. The blood evaporates, as does the water clinging to his black coveralls. 

The storm lets out a long, low rumble of protest. 

Crowley shivers. Banishing the rain from his coveralls may have left him drier, but he certainly isn’t any warmer. He blows into his chilled hands and scrubs the supernatural warmth over the sharp points of his face as he peers out at the dark, rain-smeared street. His knees and ankles, sensing a temporary reprieve from danger, start to throb in aching protest at their recent rough treatment. Crowley is suddenly filled with an intense, entirely un-demon-like desire for a scalding shower and a long stint in front of the television wrapped the largest, plushest bath towel his imagination can conjure

“Sod off,” he grumbles to no one and nothing. It’s an impressive enough storm, he’ll give it that. Managed to sneak up on him completely, turning the dull haze of an overcast afternoon to pitch black as if with the flip of a switch. He can barely see the swaying telephone pole he’d pinpointed as a weak point in the London financial district’s fax network through the rain. 

Crowley sighs. More than likely this storm will finish the job he’d half-started, and it’s not like anyone below _really_ understands the finer points of international stock trading, but Crowley isn’t usually one to let a bit of rain—however biblical in its wrath—cut his plans short. He drags his tool bag onto his lap and paws through the contents for a brief inventory, scowling as he realizes he’s lost his best spanner wrench. 

The next crack of thunder is loud enough that it makes all the Bentley’s windows rattle. The dark street plunges into inky void-black as all the street lamps go out. 

Fuck it. _Fuck it_. He’s taking the fucking credit for this and going the fuck _home_. 

The journey back to his flat feels less like a drive and more like the time early in the 12th century he’d thought he could save a bit of coin by steering his own gondola through Venice. The windscreen wipers, efficient feats of human engineering as they are, can’t keep up with the downpour. It takes more concentration than it should to keep the car centered in the lane, even at a mind-numbingly slow forty-five miles per hour and with no obstacles but the occasional equally bullheaded cab driver. 

Crowley chews at his lips, eyes wide and unblinking behind his sunglasses. He switches on the radio, fiddling with the dial until he finds a weather report. 

“_—households without power following multiple lightning strikes in central London. As of yet there’s no comment from the Met Office on its failure to forecast this sudden and dangerous thunderstorm. Londoners are advised to stay indoors and limit all unnecessary travel. Flooding has been reported in—" _

The broadcast crackles, fuzzes out. Crowley sighs in relief. Not a biblical storm, then. Someone Down Below wants a word with him and is feeling a bit melodramatic about it. Moloch, maybe, though this level of weather interference is a bit beyond what Crowley would expect of even their accursed abilities. Must have gotten a promotion and felt like showing it off.

“Look, I’ve given you my mobile twice now, I _know _you have it on file. You don’t have to go and, y’know, kick up such a _fuss _just to get my attention.”

He waits for an answer, fingers drumming nervously on the steering wheel.

“Er, hello?” His voice cracks. Something hot and cold flashes across him all at once. “Anyone there?”

The radio hisses silence. 

He swallows. Swallows again. “You’ll, uh… Have to call back. Bad connection.” The leather-wrapped steering wheel creaks under Crowley’s tightening grip. The rain pounds and pounds and pounds against the Bentley’s metal roof. “Right. _Byyeee.._.”

The storm only seems to get worse the closer he gets to Mayfair. The streets are empty now, every human with half a brain-cell’s worth of sense taking shelter in the nearest structure. Crowley shamelessly miracles himself a parking spot directly across from his building, not that the shortened journey to the front door leaves him any drier. Boots squeaking miserably on the marble tile, Crowley drips long puddles across the lobby towards the open lift before something about the way the sickly yellow light gleams off the four brushed steel walls leans _hard_ on the constant, low-grade buzz of anxiety that has kept him alive more often than it has left him for dead and he takes an abrupt right turn for the stairs.

Halfway up the second flight, the overhead lights flicker. Crowley stops, right foot on the landing, left still braced on the stair. 

Something about this storm isn’t right _at all_.

He sniffs at the air, limbs going numb as he stretches his senses to the limits. He can almost feel _something_ out in the storm, something with eyes turned in his direction, but the signal is so scrambled by the rain that it might be nothing but his overactive imagination.

The lights flicker again, then go out for good. With slow, careful deliberation, Crowley pulls a hammer from his tool bag. Flips it in his grip so it’s claw-side out. Starts climbing, the wet rubber soles of his boots miraculously noiseless on the stair tread. 

The wards rimming his floor are all still up, a finding that is not as reassuring as it should be. Crowley slithers silently into his flat, all senses on high alert. He sets down the tool bag but keeps a tight grip on the hammer. He can hear the plants trembling in the solarium even over the pound of the rain against the skylights. From the kitchen, a low hum of appliances, unplugged and completely ignorant of the power outage. The feeling of being _watched_ is stronger than ever.

The revolving false wall to his office swings open with a thought. He flicks out a forked tongue, tastes no warm, living things on the air. No cold, unliving things, either. Rain sheets the floor-to-ceiling windows so thick it makes the penthouse flat feel like it’s underwater. 

A whiteflash of brilliant, blinding light floods his office—so bright it erases the rigid outlines of the furniture, the plants, even his own corporeal body—followed immediately by an explosion of booming sound that slaps the breath out of his chest and clacks his teeth together with a snap. 

Crowley stumbles with the shock of it, dropping the hammer and catching himself on the edge of his desk. His still-oozing palms slip slightly on the cold marble. Some of his breath comes back to him, cold with ozone. There’s a tang of blood in his mouth where his nipped his tongue.

He stares out at the rain with unblinking eyes, spine stiff and shoulders hunched almost up to his ears. There’s a second flash of lightning, far enough away this time that Crowley can see the forked outline of it over the Mayfair skyline. Close enough that the boom of thunder rattles in his sternum. The wind howls, rain lashing hard against the glass until all the color seems to drain from flat, leaving Crowley in a black and white world. 

He hasn’t seen it come down like this since the Flood. 

He shivers. Wonders, briefly, if there _isn’t_ some divine wrath driving this downpour. Some ethereal presence masked by the ozone stink of a close lightning strike. One of the archangels, maybe. It would certainly suit their style. He’s seen Michael in a full snit, remembers all too keenly the soft snowfall of ash against his skin as he ran, his retreat hidden by the dark cloud that was all that remained of the few Fallen who dared hold firm with armaments raised. 

He’s dragged back to the present by an oddity of color in the monochromatic grey of his peripheral vision. A red light, faint but pulsing persistently. 

There are three messages on his Ansaphone.

Crowley’s knuckles clench white around the cold edge of the desk.

It’s unusual, to say the least. Unusual because as an early adopter of the mobile phone Crowley hasn’t given this number out in almost a decade and Lower Management never rings him directly, let alone thrice. Unusual enough that the knife of anxiety buried permanently in his guts gives a little twist. 

Another flash of lightning. The storm rumbles on indifferently.

Crowley has had almost six thousand years on Earth to lose his faith in coincidences. 

The first message is a telemarketer with very exciting news about time share prices in Spain that he immediately erases. The second is only a few seconds long, a huff of breath, and then the sound of a hand receiver being hung up. Crowley would know that huff anywhere. The knife gives another slow quarter-turn as the machine beeps and starts the third message. 

“_It’s me_,” says the familiar, slightly clipped voice of Aziraphale, former Guardian of the Eastern Gate, current erstwhile bookseller and periodic pain in his arse. “_Where are you?_”

Crowley has visions, sometimes. Flashes as he hovers on the edge of sleep that are too fast to process. Unbearable light. Crushing heat. A once-familiar shape torn apart atom by screaming atom. 

He dials Aziraphale with stiff, trembling fingers. 

The phone rings, and rings, and rings. 

Crowley tries the line in the back room, again from memory, again without answer. He slams the receiver down with a hiss. “What the fuck!” he snarls, teeth suddenly too long for his mouth. “What the _fuck, _Aziraphale!”

The phone starts to ring beneath his hand. He snatches it up before it can finish.

“_Crowley_.” Aziraphale sounds breathless. He doesn’t bother to announce himself, as if it’s beyond him that anyone else would ever phone the demon. “I’ve sold a book.” 

The knife in his guts untwists. Crowley collapses into his desk chair, a puppet with its strings cut. 

If the storm pounds on against the windows, he can’t hear it over the thump of his heart.

He pushes his glasses up on top of his head so he can scrub some feeling back into his face. At least his buzzed-short hair is already dry. “_Christ_, angel! Thought the world was going to end, way you sounded on the machine.”

“It might as well, if this sort of nonsense continues! Why I’m—I’m simply _beside_ myself! To think that despite all my _precautions_, all my _carefully laid defenses_, I would be so unfairly _waylaid_, so discourteously _burgled—_!”

He goes on in this vein for almost a minute, never swearing outright but veering dangerously close on occasion. An image of the angel pacing restlessly back and forth over the faded rose-pattern rug, house coat half-buttoned, reading glasses pushed haphazardly on top of his own tangled curls, comes to Crowley like a candle in the dark. Slowly, ever so slowly, he starts to relax. The sound of the rain drifts back into his awareness, but the plink of water against glass is softer, now, as if it too has been lulled by the angel’s impassioned prattling. 

The demon lets the last of the tension fall from his shoulders. With a snap of his fingers, an imposing fire roars to life in the marble-framed grate to Crowley’s right. He briefly considers miracling himself the rest of the way dry, but the way his pants and coveralls are clinging as he swivels slowly back and forth in the leather chair, angel rumbling low and indignant in his ear as he comes down from his adrenaline high, is just interesting enough to warrant further exploration, so he leaves them be for now.

“Technically, you are a _purveyor _of books,” he drawls, tucking the receiver under his chin so he can unzip his wet coveralls. “There’s a sign on your door and everything.”

“_Technically_,” Aziraphale snips. “I’m down one _Opticks: Or A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light _by Sir Isaac Newton. _Original binding!_” His voice rises slightly in pitch. "Full gilt-ruled calf! Red morocco lettering! 12 folded engraved plates intact with only minor soiling!"

Crowley grins, enjoying Aziraphale’s askance indignation very much now that he’s not pissing himself in terror. He settles more comfortably in his chair—a burnished leather mockery of Herman Miller’s Eames lounger with aluminum wheels and 12 nobs to adjust the degree of lean and swivel—and sets to work wiggling out of his wet boots. 

“Was it signed?”

“Good _Lord_, no!” says the angel, in a tone that implies that he may be stupid, but certainly not as stupid as _that_. 

“First edition?”

“Fourth. Not that it was exactly cheap to come by. Anyway. I’m letting myself get distracted. The book isn’t important. Or it is, but it isn’t. The book is a _casualty_.” 

Crowley frowns. “A casualty? A casualty of wh—_ah!_” One boot slips off with a perverse suck of wet leather.

“Crowley?” Aziraphale’s tone is suddenly alert. “Is everything all right?”

“Taking my boots off.” The second puts up more of a fight. After much fumbling and muttering under his breath, he gives up the fight, miracles the knotted laces loose, and kicks it free. It _thunks_ against a far concrete wall satisfyingly, followed shortly by two burgundy cashmere socks. “Went for a bit of an unexpected swim.”

“Ah. Yes. Well…” Aziraphale almost sounds… bashful. If Crowley closes his eyes, he can imagine him twirling the phone cord around and around his broad, manicured fingers. The pound of the rain hasn’t lessened, but its rhythm is soothing now, the pulses of the storm against the windows just enough to drown out the constant buzz of his head, keep his full focus on the faint static sound of Aziraphale’s breathing. “Sorry about that. Not my… not my _department_, the weather. It’s only _logical_, right? Perfectly _reasonable_, if you think about it.”

Crowley glances at the fireplace, searching the flickering flames for familiar, hellish faces. He blinks the blaze out of existence with a little too much force, leaving a blank stretch of concrete wall where the grate used to be. “Angel, have you been _drinking_?”

“_No_.” The answer comes far, far too quickly. “Well, I… That is, not _today_, I don’t think. I need to talk to you. S’why I phoned. Been phoning. Can I come up?”

Crowley glances out the window, at the storm that still rages outside no matter how dulled it sounds compared to Aziraphale’s voice in his ear. He raises his hips in anticipation of peeling the coveralls the rest of the way off. “Don’t know how you’ll be able to spot a cab in this weather.”

“Oh _no_, I won’t need a cab. I’m right across the street.”

Crowley freezes, half out of the chair and hands tangled in the wet fabric at his waist. “What?”

“There’s a telephone box, right here on the corner. I can see your window and everything. Your lights aren’t on, though. Is your power out? Absolutely _dreadful_ storm, I didn’t mean—” 

Whatever Aziraphale didn’t mean, Crowley doesn’t hear it, too busy taking the stairs down to street level two at a time, bare feet leaving wet footprints that linger a while in the dark before vanishing, unnoticed. 


	3. Chapter 3

{0}

“Crowley?”

The voice calling his name echoes slightly, as if coming from the far side of a still lake, or the top of a deep, stone-walled well. As if it has been calling Crowley’s name for a while now. 

He is staring up at a black sky pierced a million times over with white stars. There’s a strange, multi-note taste in his mouth. Smokesour at the front of his palette, dustdry at the back. Burnt chalk, somewhere in the middle. 

Crowley blinks. The stars do not blink back. 

A firm, steady warmth wraps around his middle, righting him before he realizes he’s stumbled. 

“Steady, old boy.” The voice is closer now. Bright and familiar, drawing him in with its gravity. “Mind how you go.”

“Hgnk?” says Crowley, tongue numb where it presses against dry teeth. He feels clammy. Light-headed. A faint breeze runs cool fingers through the sweaty tousle of his hair.

It takes an immense effort to pull his gaze away from the infinite stretch of the cosmos, void-black at the center, fading to lavender at the edges where it meets a jagged line of dark leaves. Then down, down the grey steel phalanx of ordered tree trunks, their uncountable ranks parted by a slow, still river of black coal. His own feet, black snakeskin almost invisible against the water. One in front of the other in a swaying, hard-learned rhythm. 

That he is unsteady on his feet is not a surprise.

That he is _unsinking_…

Crowley blinks again. The river hardens into asphalt, his scaled feet into familiar, pointed boots. He is walking along an empty road through a forest on the tail end of sunset. Insects sing in his ears as he totters back and forth across the white line marking the curb, his boots occasionally veering far enough to the right that he crunches along pale gravel. 

He doesn’t know where this road is or how he came to walk along it, but he _does_ know that there is a second set of shoed feet walking beside his own. A second body pressed close against his, its arm tight around his waist.

He breathes in. There is no smoke. There is only something dear and familiar. His heart thumps heavily in his chest. 

“_Aziraphale_,” he croaks. 

The angel’s pale, round face shines gold in the darkness like the first rise of the full moon. His expression is more careworn that Crowley is used to seeing, the skin between his brows creased with worry marks and his eyes heavily shadowed, but he smiles at Crowley with a relieved, full-toothed delight that makes the demon’s chest clench reflexively. 

“Oh _there_ you are,” he says softly, like Crowley is a dear treasure lost for years and years in the back of a dark cabinet, only to turn up again when most missed. 

“_Nnng_,” answers Crowley, faintly nauseous as he settles a little more fully back into his body. “I left?”

“Mm-hm. Just for a little while. Only…” He’s still smiling, still showing most of his too-square teeth, but there’s something brittle at the corners of his mouth. There’s a strange sound in the dark, a faint clink of metal against metal. Aziraphale tightens his hold on Crowley’s quilted blazer. “Well. After everything that’s happened that’s happened today… One _does_ get worried.”

“Right,” Crowley slurs. He tries to remember, tries to pin the stars to his sour tongue to his body’s screaming expectation that every breath should burn with smoke. To Aziraphale’s touch, his voice close in his ear. The relief in that voice, a relief that resonates through the whole of his own soul like it’s been touched with a tuning fork. 

He frowns at their feet, the tangled pattern of their overlapping steps. His head aches. 

“Why’re we _walking_?”

Aziraphale lets out quick, bubbling bark of laughter. “Had a change of heart, have you? _C’mon, Aziraphale—_” His voice rises in pitch, takes on an embarrassingly put-upon drawl. “—_it isn’t that far! We used to walk everywhere, Aziraphale. Don’t you want to go for a midnight stroll with Old Crowley, Aziraphale? Remember Machu Picchu? Remember the gardens of Babylon? Remember…"_

There’s a muffled, brassy chime as Aziraphale punctuates his speech with little jerks of his arm, as if conducting an unseen orchestra. It’s a small, simple sound, but it sends a shiver of ice straight down Crowley’s back. 

Aziraphale is holding a small set of measuring scales loose in his fist. 

An endless, crimson sunset over space-black tarmac. Three children on ringing bikes winding lazily towards a dark line of smoke rising tall beyond a distant fence. A jeep surrounded by a limp pile of still, uniformed bodies. 

“Oh,” Crowley says.

“Right,” Crowley says.

Aziraphale looming over him, flaming sword raised shoulder high.

His feet stagger to a stop. His stomach clenches. He curls around it. Wretches, but nothing comes up. 

Aziraphale lets go of his blazer. Crowley’s stomach gives another hard squeeze of terror, but the angel is only shifting his grip, hand flat and pressing slow circles into the small of his back. 

The scales sway and clang in the cool night breeze. Crowley braces unfeeling hands against his knees and forces himself to breathe in and out until Aziraphale’s scent has completely filled him.

“We saved the world?” He doesn’t mean for it to come out like a question, but it does. 

Aziraphale hums in affirmation.

Crowley spits, but the the burnt, sour taste doesn’t fade. He straightens. Tries not to look at the scales, the tarnished crown hooked around the angel’s elbow, the bronze-handled sword and scabbard tucked tight under his arm. 

“Y’know,” he says leadenly. “I had doubts, there at the end.”

“Did you now?” Aziraphale’s own exhaustion is evident despite the unyielding iron of his arm as it slips higher up Crowley’s torso, finally settling just below his shoulder-blades as if to help carry his weight, but his cadence bears a hopeful hint of his old smug, faint bemusement, the consonants clipped in a way that buoys Crowley up even further. 

They start walking again. Back to the village. Crowley remembers now, though the remembering has a flat, soundless quality to it, like a dream borrowed from somebody else. The last dregs of purple dusk slip below the horizon, leaving them to plod along in full dark for almost half a mile before the first lights of Tadfield start to peek through the trees. 

“How did you do that, by the way?”

“Do what?” Crowley feels a bit steadier on his feet, or at least more solid in his connection to his corporeal form. A solidity he’s starting to regret as his muscles start to register more and more complaints.

Aziraphale shoots him a glance, one eyebrow raised and mouth quirked in familiar, fond annoyance. He tilts his head towards the white shimmer of the Milky Way above, as if in explanation.

“Those dunes. Something about them was familiar. They weren’t…” Another sideways glance, this one sparkling with embers from an old, old fire. “Were they?”

“Dunes?” Crowley echoes. He tries to follow Aziraphale’s upward gaze, but as his head tilts further and further back he feels faint again, suddenly and intensely aware of the turning of the earth beneath him, the expansion and crunch of the stars overhead, the still illusion of relativity broken. 

“Crowley?” Aziraphale’s attention snaps back to him with sudden, sharp force. His grey eyes seem to glow with their own starlight. “Are you alright?”

“M’fine,” Crowley groans, only to be immediately betrayed by the sway of his body as he overbalances and presses more of his weight into the angel. 

Aziraphale clucks disapprovingly. Crowley tries again.

“Feel funny. Dizzy…” As heavy as his lower limbs have become, his upper half feels strangely light, as if the two ends of him were being pulled further and further apart. He tries to convey all of this with a gesture, limp hands raised imploringly to the wide stretch of the cosmos above. Cygnus burns bright directly above them, its shape almost cartoonish in its clarity, like something copied from a picture book, Albiero and Sadr and Fawaris and Aljanah each as dazzling as the white supergiant Deneb at the swan’s tail, the spaces between the stars all the darker despite the constellation’s flight along the length of the Milky Way.

“’S jusss… _Big_, yeah?”

Aziraphale’s sharp gaze goes soft and distant. Like he can see Crowley as he is now and as he has been in all the spaces up to now, all layered one on top of the other. “You and stars,” he murmurs fondly. 

Slow heat spreads up through Crowley’s middle. He wants very much to press his mouth to Aziraphale’s, right there at one of the corners, where his cheeks are dimpled with 6000 years’ of kindness and worry and heady, bookish mischief. Or maybe the soft skin just below his ear, where the muscles of his neck stretch taught from jaw to collarbone as the angel turns his gaze contemplatively back to the heavens. 

“The constellations _are_ rather bright, here. I’d expected them to be brighter than London, but this…” Aziraphale looks uneasy as he squints back up at the sky. “Do you think it’s because of the boy?”

_The boy_. 

Eleven years’ anxious practice first turns his thoughts to Warlock, but no, that isn’t right, is it? The head peering out of the back of the retreating vintage sedan had been tousle-blonde, not night-sleek, the hand waving a morose farewell tanned by a long summer of unchecked freedom. 

Had Warlock been allowed to walk unbloodied from the fields? In the moments after Hastur’s realization, who had suffered his wrath?

His crudest, most far-reaching senses have wriggled halfway across continental Europe before he remembers Adam’s admonishment. _No interfering_. He jams his hands into his pockets with a hiss.

“Probably. What kid doesn’t like space?” 

Aziraphale’s mouth purses in thought. “I suppose they’ll start to fade. Now that it’s all over.”

Crowley shrugs. Grunts as the motion pulls at all the small muscles along the length of his spine. 

“Now see here,” says Aziraphale sharply. “You can’t go making a noise like _that_ while looking a sudden breeze will carry you off and expect me to just accept all your wobbling about as just another existential crisis. It’s an insult to my intelligence, let alone our friendship.”

Crowley grumbles out a long series of wordless consonants, but ultimately confesses. The last of his ability to lie has completely burned out of him. “Guess I am a bit sore. You don’t have any, um…” 

He snaps his fingers, but nothing appears, not even the words for it. The heaviness of his body is dragging at him to the point where he can only keep one thought in his head at a time. Right now the thought is placing one foot in front of the other until he finds somewhere to sit down. Even his watch seems to share his fatigue, the spaces between the ticks seeming to come longer and longer. He makes a crude pantomime of a hand holding a bottle.

“Oh! Right, of course!” Crowley immediately regrets his request as Aziraphale’s arm is forced to release him. Aziraphale pulls a glass bottle out of the air—green with a squared-off base and a faded paper label—and presses it into one of Crowley’s still limply dangling hands. 

The bottle sloshes. Definitely not the aspirin he was hoping for. He holds it up for inspection. 

“Angel, you just gave me _hooch_.”

“It’s _medicine_,” Aziraphale corrects. “Doctor Jenkins’ Fortifying Nerve Cordial for Maladies of the Body and Spirit.”

“Spirit maladies, eh? Makes sense. Says here one of the main ingredients is grain alcohol. And also fucking _opium_.”

“It’s medicine with a _kick_,” Aziraphale concedes. 

Crowley is slowly starting to warm to the angel’s point of view. It takes some force to undo the ornate metal stopper with his still-buzzing fingers, but he manages it after a moment. Crowley leans back to take a long, immediately regretted swig.

“Fuck!” he sputters, spitting and coughing until the last of the vile slosh has been banished from his corporation. “Angel, this is _retched_!”

“Now _really_,” Aziraphale tuts. “These things were never popular because they tasted _good_, my dear.”

“No, no, I mean it’s gone off. Look.” He holds the bottle up to the angel’s nose. Aziraphale recoils.

“Oh, that’s just foul!”

“It’s foul with a _kick_, you mean.” Crowley gives the bottle another experimental swig to see if the experience is any better now that the shock of it has worn off. It hasn’t. “_Uckgh!_ Usually your conjured stuff is better than this.”

Untethered from the pretense of helping Crowley walk, Aziraphale’s right hand doesn’t seem to quite know what to do with itself. It flutters nervously in the dark between them before settling to pluck at the lapels of his coat. “I, ah. Didn’t conjure it.”

“You what?”

“I sort of… borrowed it, I suppose. You know.” His hand darts forward, then back, as if snatching something from a shelf. Crowley stares at him. 

“Like from a museum?” Aziraphale’s guilty grimace is all the answer he needs. “You _stole_ it?”

“It’s not really stealing if it’s… If… I think we can both agree, given the present circumstances, it’s, it’s rather more like _conscription_, isn’t it? At least—now _really,_ Crowley!” Aziraphale’s increasingly high-pitched babbling draws suddenly up short as he turns to find the demon at a dead stop two paces behind him, bent double and shaking with silent laughter. “I don’t see what’s quite so funny about the blasted _apocalypse_!”

Crowley shakes his head, unable to explain this drunken, dizzying mix of feeling.

He wants to sit down, right there on the side of the road, so he can put his head between his knees and well and truly _scream_. He wants to pull Aziraphale down with him and roll them both over the gravel and into the grassy ditch and burrow into the mud and fallen leaves and lie there rotting together while the bad old world spins on and on uncaring as Heaven and Hell champ at the bit and grow increasingly difficult to tell apart. And those are both exceedingly dangerous thoughts, if only because he’s pretty certain once he’s finally no longer vertical it’ll take a minor miracle he doesn’t have in him to pull him back to his feet again. 

Somewhere along the way, Crowley’s mirth has turned into hysterical, shuddering sobs.

“_Christ_, Aziraphale. It really almost _d__id_ all end, didn’t it?”

Aziraphale’s thick fingers ghost once through his hair, so light it might have been a dream, before lighting on the far safer territory of his shoulder. “I think that was rather the _point_ of it, dear boy.”

“You really would have never—” Crowley goes to wipe the wetness from his face, forgetting about the bottle still loose in his grip. He curses in pain as the neck of it knocks hard against his teeth, bruising his lip and spilling dark, foul liquid all down his front.

Aziraphale seizes the bottle and with a burst of whipchord fury hurls it far into the night. It shatters somewhere along the road back to the airbase. 

“You shouldn’t litter, angel,” Crowley says, once he’s calmed enough for speech. “Don’t know who might be watching.”

“Oh they can go and _stuff it_,” Aziraphale snips, pressing a new bottle into his hands, still green but smooth with a familiar heft and shape and a crisp label declaring it a Girardin Chateau De La Charriere Santenay Ier Cru “Maladiere”, 1993. A wet, bad year for Bordeaux wine, but drinkable in a pinch. 

And hail and high praises to the blessed fucking archangels and each of the bastard dukes of hell, the damned thing is even uncorked. 


	4. Chapter 4

The sewers are starting to back up by the time Crowley hits street level, turning the road into an ankle-deep, oil-filmed river of frothing black. It’s been a long, long time since Crowley could walk on water, but that doesn’t slow him in the slightest. He crosses the road in three long, splashing strides, only dimly registering the scrape of the pavement against his soles when he hits the far sidewalk. 

The rain is still coming down like anything, stinging against his skin as he runs, arms curled over his head as if that will keep him any dryer. He finds the red telephone box quickly enough, a red and gold monolith looming bright in the gloom. There’s a vaguely human-shaped shadow inside of the box, its physical boundaries obscured by the rain, slowly sharpening into a familiar angelic form as Crowley’s slapping feet carry him closer and closer.

Aziraphale still has the phone receiver pressed against his ear. It’s hard to make out his expression through the rain-warped glass, but Crowley recognizes the sway of his back and the cock of his head as polite befuddlement. He skids to a rough stop but still slams hard against the box’s glass-paned door, so pumped on adrenaline it takes him two tries to find the latch. Aziraphale doesn’t so much as startle. 

“Hello? Hell—" Crowley flings the door open. Aziraphale at last turns, round face brightening. “—oh! _There_ you are!”

He drops the receiver, reaching out to pull Crowley in from the storm just as Crowley forces his way in. They end up in a bit of a tangle, limbs and bodies knocking against each other as they jostle for position, the phone receiver swaying back and forth like a pendulum. It’s a few moments before Crowley can free an arm to close the door behind him. 

“Here _I _am?! What the deuce are _you_ doing here?”

It’s very crowded in the telephone box. Crowley doesn’t have much room to properly loom, but he makes a fair go of it, pressing the angel further against the far wall and trying to convey with the whole of his body his general dissatisfaction with the storm, Aziraphale’s location dead at the center of it, and the sopping call girl adverts sticking to the bottom of his feet. 

“You’re all wet,” Aziraphale says, frowning.

“Don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Crowley snips, “but it’s raining like, like…” 

“Like the devil,” Aziraphale supplies absently. One pale gold hand drifts to the tangle of fabric at Crowley’s waist and plucks at it experimentally. “Is this really the fashion these days? I’m afraid I’ve rather lost track.”

Crowley glances downward, water dripping off his nose to add to the mess on the floor, only now fully registering his bare feet, the wet flap of the half-off coveralls dragging low on his waist, the white, goose-pimpled flesh of his arms and shoulders stark against his soaked-through vest, his nipples pinpricked with cold. When he looks back up again, the pointed face staring back at him from the storm-blacked glass is bare and yellow-eyed. 

With a snap he’s dry and fully dressed in his usual black. Snakeskin boots, of course. A thin, baggy tee tucked into drainpipes cuffed just high enough to flash a stripe of blood red socks against bone pale skin. A broad-shouldered, oversized blazer that skims like a pair of folded bat wings along the middle of his thighs. Silver studs in his ears to match the chain lying hidden against his breastbone. Round, rimless sunglasses.

“Ah. Hmm….” Aziraphale gives him another long, thorough look, hand hovering for a moment before falling back to his side. “I’m not sure that’s much better.” His grey eyes linger for a long, unblinking moment on Crowley’s red halo of buzzed hair.

“Says you,” Crowley replies, frowning as he finishes his own once-over of the angel. Instead of his usual impression of old-fashioned, comfortably rumpled formality, Aziraphale looks thoroughly bedraggled. His curls are mussed far beyond their dry, familiar tousle, some tight against his head from the rain, others completely undone and standing on end as if he’s been tugging at them. His waistcoat is done up with a skipped button, and his bowtie is noticeably uneven. His overcoat is dark brown with interconnected raindrops, as are his trousers from the knees down, all the fabric in between damp to varying degrees. Crowley is struck with the impression that Aziraphale may have _walked_ from Soho. 

He sniffs at the air, tongue darting out for a fuller taste. There’s Aziraphale’s usual scent, of course— though the top notes of dust and forgotten cups of tea are soured by a wild, frenetic energy that burns if he focuses on it too long—but beneath it is something wholly unfamiliar. Something big and undeniably magic, sucking and feral and hungry, far beyond the scope of anything Crowley has ever dared. Behind coal-dark lenses, his yellow eyes widen in alarm. 

“Angel, is all this rain _you_?”

“Hm? Oh. Yes. I suppose it must be…” His eyes are very round when they finally meet Crowley’s, the pupils wide and focused on a point somewhere beyond his corporeal form. “Might have overdone it. Just a tad. Not my… not my _department_, you see.”

“Might have, yeah,” Crowley says. It takes considerable effort to keep his voice calm. He’s never seen Aziraphale completely lose the reins of a miracle, and he doesn’t know quite what to do about it. “Decide to give it a whirl for any particular reason, or is this just for the hell of it?”

Aziraphale seems utterly confounded by the question. His hands fumble at the buttons of his waistcoat, pulling and thumbing at the places where the velvet has gone bald. “I needed…. I need, I…” 

He dims, eyes wide and lost. Then, just as suddenly, he brightens.

“I need a _favor_,” he says fervently, eyes locking onto Crowley’s through the glasses and seeming to truly _see_ him for the first time. “Crowley…”

It isn’t a question, really. Crowley answers it anyway.

“Anything,” he says. The word fogs white on the glass. There’s a distant rumble of thunder. “Anything at all.” 

“I need you to, to, oh goodness!” He lets out a high, choked sound that might have been a laugh if he had more air in his lungs. His ring glistens as he reaches up to run a trembling hand through his curls. “It’s all so very _complicated_. I suppose it would make more sense I started at the beginning.” 

Crowley waits, but no further explanation seems to be forthcoming. “A drink might be a good place to start,” he prompts.

“A drink, yes.” Aziraphale’s voice is faint, as if he was somewhere very far away instead of pressed close enough to Crowley for their breaths to intermingle. “Haven’t had one of those today, I don’t think.”

“You don’t say.” 

It’s harder than ever to keep his worry under control, but Crowley hasn’t made it six thousand years with only a handful of discorporations to his name by sheer luck alone. He peers through the rain-streaked panes back in the direction of his flat. Sure enough, he can just make out the black maw of his office windows. He briefly considers teleporting them, but he’s never taken another supernatural being along with him. Given Azirphale’s wild, far-away look, he’s reluctant to find out what might happen if his concentration is completely snapped. 

Looks like they’re doing this the human way. 

Crowley pulls an umbrella out of his blazer pocket. It’s a shit umbrella, one his prouder designs, the kind that promises travel convenience and folds up sleek and black and modern but comes undone at the first hint of an updraft. It performs exactly as promised the moment Crowley struggles the door open and clicks the button. He bullies it back into shape with a fair amount of cursing, keeping a threatening grip tight on the handle as he pulls Aziraphale beneath its meager protection and launches them both out into the wind-driven rain. 

“Hell of a storm you’ve managed, Aziraphale!” They’re the only two fools on the sidewalk for as far as he can see. 

Aziraphale shakes his head, curls grazing soft along the top of Crowley’s cheek, his temple. Even pressed close as they are, they are each only half-dry. Less than half, in Crowley’s case. He resolutely doesn’t think about making a bigger umbrella. “Quite the opposite, actually.”

A bark of laughter surprises Crowley as it forces its way out of his tight chest. The umbrella takes this moment of distraction to flip inside out again. 

“Oh for _fuck’s _sake!” Crowley snarls, letting the wind take the damned thing. He grabs Aziraphale by the wrist and pulls him under the nearby meager shelter of flapping awning. 

The awning belongs to a pub. The windows are dark, but a hand-written sign has been taped to the inside of the glass, declaring them open for business. Crowley steers them inside like it was his plan all along. 

He almost steers them right back out again once he gets a good look at the interior. On first glance it’s a traditional lads’ sport pub, the kind that would have a footy game on all three oversized televisions if the power wasn’t out, but there’s a level of artifice to its scuffed wood paneling and antiqued brass fixtures that makes his nose wrinkle. Like the tacked-up jerseys and framed vintage pinups were props for the rich young day traders Crowley calls neighbor, intentionally scuffed and faded to a rough parody of working-class hominess. Even the stickiness of the floor feels fake, and when Crowley flicks out his tongue for a quick taste he’s not surprised to catch the sweet tang of distilled soda mixed with mop water. 

Not Crowley’s kind of place, though he makes a note to take credit for it in next quarter’s filings. Probably not Aziraphale’s kind of place, either, though given his former enthusiasm for betting ludicrous sums on fencing matches maybe he’s being presumptuous. 

The pub is far from empty despite the blackout. Most of the humans are huddled together at tiny tables pushed close to the front windows to take advantage of whatever dim grey light remains. A few are seated at the bar, little more than silhouettes in the flickering glow of a stumpy emergency candle burning low in a glass tumbler, two of them egging on the bartender as he fiddles with the dials of a battery-power stereo hissing a long low stream of static. 

At least it’s dry, the sound of the rain mostly muffled. Crowley drags Aziraphale to a dark booth in the back, far from the lightning that still flashes in the windows and the bartender’s pointed glance at his hand tight around Aziraphale’s coat sleeve. 

“Here,” he says, slicking the damp out of Aziraphale’s coat with two quick sweeps of his hand across his shoulders before before pushing him into the far side of the booth. “Don’t go wandering off now.” Aziraphale nods mechanically, sitting stiff with his hands pressed hard against the tabletop, as if he’s afraid of what they’ll do unfettered. 

It’s been a couple of decades since he last saw the angel smoke, but Crowley suddenly wants to press a lit cigarette between his fingers just to see if the muscle memory of hand to mouth could break this strange, stilted trembling. 

The bar tender has had no luck finding a clear station by the time he’s sauntered up to the bar. He gives the stereo a grumbling, perfunctory smack. “What a piece of shit. You believe this? Brand new, too.” He twists the dial to the left, then to the right. The static swells and fades in pitch, but never clears. 

Crowley grunts. There’s a faint ring of magic at the edge of the static, further jangling his nerves. He slaps a fan of bills down onto the counter. “Single malt, two glasses. Fullest bottle you’ve got.”

The bartender eyebrow briefly lifts at the face value on the bills. He sets two glasses onto the bar and turns to start rummaging along one of the higher shelves. Crowley can feel the gaze of the slim dark-haired man at the end of the bar lingering on the glint of the stud in his ear before sliding down the long line of his throat, the curve his body as he leans serpentine against the bar. His wants are old and predictable. Crowley ignores him.

“Nice watch,” says the man at the stool next to him, suit jacket hung from the back of the barstool and sleeves rolled up twice to reveal a thick band of ticking silver on his left wrist. He folds his arm across the edge of the bar and angles his hand so his own watch glints and flashes in the candlelight. “Devon? Always been more a JLC fan, myself.”

“Patek Philippe,” Crowley corrects. This man’s wants are also old, but less predictable. More dangerous to ignore. “Custom order. Those Devon bastards are a bunch of hacks.”

The man’s expression twists, like he’s not sure if Crowley’s pulling his leg. He tilts his beer pointedly in Aziraphale’s direction. “Looks like your friend is having a rough one.”

Crowley glances over his shoulder, sees the ghost of Aziraphale in the gloom, barely visible in the shadows even with his pale coloring. He looks small, sitting there in the dark. Small, and very, very alone. 

“Trouble with a _lady_friend?” he asks. His face is heavily shadowed in the low candlelight, his smile full of neat square teeth. 

Crowley smiles back. Shows his own teeth, wet and far from square. “Yeah. Real piece of work, She is,” he hisses, just at the bartender returns with a mostly full bottle of Talisker. Crowley picks up the bottle and both glasses with one hand, closes the other over the mouth of the tumbler with the still-burning candle. The flame licks hot at his palm. The man with the glinting watch stares, mouth closed as Crowley raises the tumbler in farewell. “Cheers.”

Aziraphale has something white and square in his hands that he vanishes into his coat pocket the moment Crowley approaches the table. Crowley pretends not to notice.

“Think this should suit you,” he says, pouring Aziraphale a heavy four fingers as a starter. 

Aziraphale picks it up and downs it like a shot. Crowley pours him a second, then a third, then a respectable three fingers for himself. 

They go back and forth like this for a good bit, silent at first, then talking in careful short bursts of nothing of consequence until the bottle is almost two thirds gone. Aziraphale has lost some of his rigidity, slumping forward with his elbows splayed wide on the table. By some trick of grace or bone structure, the candle casts no harsh shadows on his face, instead softening the fine worry lines between his eyebrows, lightening the dark bags beneath his eyes. There’s still a wild, wind-blown look to him, his gaze overwide and focus flitting across the topics of their conversation like a nervous hummingbird, but he seems more settled in his corporation, less frayed raw at the edges. Crowley judges him shored enough for a little light teasing. 

“I take it you don’t like it, then.”

“The scotch? No no no, it tastes…” Aziraphale trails off, blinking dazedly at the drink in his hand, clearly at a loss to describe anything about it.

“I meant my hair.”

Aziraphale’s round eyes immediately snap to the top of Crowley’s head, then back to his drink.

“I never said that,” he mumbles into the glass.

“You’re saying it right now,” Crowley says, tossing his head with a grin.

Aziraphale swallows, gaze drifting guiltily up again. “It’s just… different. Don’t think I’ve ever seen it so short. Issit growing in from being shaved?”

Crowley grimaces in disgust. “’M not a _skinhead_, angel.”

“Of course not, my dear. Never meant to suggest otherwise. It just…” 

Crowley stretches his legs as far under the table as they’ll go. Tosses his head again. “Jussst _what_?”

Aziraphale squints, clearly thinking hard. 

“It reminds me of that woman. The one with the pope?” He mimes holding up a piece of paper and tearing it in two. “Very striking.”

The compliment burns through Crowley like a blade fresh from the forge. “You’re too kind,” he deflects with forced sarcasm. Hopefully the single candle isn’t enough for Aziraphale to notice the blush blooming from his chest to his ears.

If Aziraphale is with it enough for their usual certainly-not flirting, then it’s time to get down to business. 

“That book you sold…” He checks his watch, decides now is the perfect time for the second hand on Mr. JLC’s to start running half a tick slow. “Didn’t think you went in for fourth editions.”

Aziraphale tilts his empty glass forward, and Crowley obligingly refills it. “Not normally, no. Only he kept insisting on making _revisions_. Funny old fellow, Newton. Did you know him?”

“Did _I_ know Newton!” Crowley echoes mockingly. “Surprised _you_ did. Never knew you to follow the modern sciences.”

Aziraphale concedes his point with a shrug. “Not all of them are worth the bother. To be frank I quit keeping up with it sometime around the industrial revolution. Everything got a bit too machine focused for my taste, and Augustan prose was just getting terribly exciting, and, well. The rest I like to have on hand for reference, seeing as it all gets mixed up with the theologies now and again. And the math is very good, I do like that, though they can be so terribly _funny_ sometimes, with their, with their _theorems_. And their hypotenuses. _Hy-po-the-ses._ The old boy did have a few interesting things to say about light particles, I’ll grant him that. If he’d lived long enough to put out another two editions I think he might have cracked it. The lass who first owned my fourth edition left some very interesting notes in the…”

He trails off, gaze distant, as if suddenly struck anew by the loss. There’s still drink in his glass, but that doesn’t stop Crowley from leaning over and pouring him a top-up. 

“Ah.” Aziraphale blinks down at the glass in his hands, as if this is the first he’s seen of it. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.” Crowley watches as he purses his lips and takes a long, careful sip. His first proper taste of the bottle. Aziraphale lets out a small humph of pleasure. A muscle in Crowley’s left cheek spasms in agony as he finally forces his jaw to unclench.

He slings an arm along the back of the booth and lets the rest of his body slump sideways across the seat, hanging like a one-armed crucifixion. “To your prodigal stock,” he says, glass raised in offering. “May it someday return.”

Aziraphale laughs. It’s a small, ragged sort of laugh, but a laugh, nevertheless. They clink glasses.

It’s actually a rather good single malt scotch, all things considered.

“So,” Crowley drawls, finally feeling safe enough to throw himself into the lion’s den. “How did the humans get the drop on you this time?”

“My own distraction, I’m afraid,” Aziraphale grumbles. The alcohol at last seems to be fully calming him, his words more anchored and ordered than they’ve been, a touch of red blush dusting his cheeks. “Didn’t even notice someone had come in. By the time I looked up she was head and shoulders in my back shelves and asking me if I preferred Visa or Mastercard.” He rolls his eyes. “Blasted woman. I nearly had to wrestle my personal translation of Fibonacci’s _Liber Abaci_ away from her.”

“Newton was the sacrificial lamb?” Crowley guesses.

“She was just so _eager_,” Aziraphale sighs. “A real enthusiast for the subjects, not one of the sort I usually get. And I had the Summons right there out on the counter in plain sight, like an _idiot_, and I couldn’t well enough let her get a gander at _that_!”

Crowley gestures towards Aziraphale’s open coat flap with a jerk of his chin. “That it in your pocket?”

The little color that has returned to Aziraphale’s face quickly drains. “Not exactly.”

Crowley sticks out his hand, palm up. Twitches his fingers in a quick, pointed _gimme_. 

Hell has never been one for printed Summons. Too much extra work for the files department. A shame, really. There are some great calligraphers on staff, their expertise honed through millennia of hand-copying soul contracts out on long, golden scrolls. Dagon, before she clawed and bit her way up to Lord, had been particularly noted for her skill in ornate initial capitals. Very fussy, Dagon. Very keen on details. Very, _very_ sharp teeth.

The small, square envelope is addressed to _Mr. Ezra Fell_ in shimmering, dark green calligraphy that’s not quite up to Hell’s exacting standards. Nor, Crowley notes with a frown, does it meet Heaven’s slightly lesser, though excessively more flourished quality parameters. Crowley’s brow furrows. The paper has the right look to it, all right—mottled parchment yellowed almost to gold—but as old as the envelope looks it _feels_ new beneath his fingertips, cool in a way that immediately pegs it as earthly in origin. 

Inside the envelope is a single sheet of heavy cardstock paper, just as intentionally old fashioned as the envelope. Crowley reads the heavily scrolled text. Allows himself a rare blink. Reads it again. 

“This is a wedding invitation.”

“Yes,” says Aziraphale mournfully.

Crowley frowns. Flips the invitation over, but finds no enlightenment printed on the back. 

“You need my help with a wedding?”

“Next week,” Aziraphale says by way of answering. “Up in Cambridge. Have you been?”

Crowley has, but it takes him a moment to place it. “Not since those fellows all got chucked out of Oxford for being drunkards with overloud opinions on the treatises. Twelve-something or other.”

“Excellent. You’re familiar with the campus, then.” Aziraphale nods, as if the matter is fully settled. “You won’t be able to attend the ceremony, of course, but the reception is being held in one of the non-consecrated buildings.” 

Crowley’s thumb slips along the crisp edge of the card, nearly drawing blood. His mouth feels very dry. “Aziraphale, are you asking me to be your _plus one_?”

Aziraphale’s face flashes quickly through a handful of complicated expressions before settling on professional, angelic blankness. 

“They want me,” he says slowly, both hands wrapped tight around his glass, “to _bless_ the nuptials.”

He says it like it’s something dirty, something broken and pitiful. A small animal, dead and bloated on the side of the road. Crowley taps the edge of the invitation restlessly against the tabletop, thinking through the implications of that tone. “I take it you’re not quite keen on the job.”

Aziraphale huffs out a long, weary breath, mouth thin.

Crowley flips the invitation between his fingers, taps the other edge of it against the wood. They don’t ask each other questions. That’s part of the Arrangement. The hardest, most necessary part. 

“Sure, I’ll do it. Happily ever after, and all that… _Froo-froo-ah_.” He waves the card absently through the air. Smiles a small, careful smile. “Been a while since I got to dust that one off. I actually kind of—”

“That’s the problem, Crowley,” Aziraphale interrupts. He sounds stricken. “It’s got to be _me_.”

“_Got_ to?”

Aziraphale nods, gaze downturned. Crowley sips at his drink and waits, listening to the muffled, static hiss of the rain outside. 

“I have a few friends, still,” the angel says at length, pointing briefly upward before letting his hand fall heavily to the table. “Not many, but… I’ve been careful about it. They’re well-placed, and generally well-meaning. And those that aren’t, well, nobody likes a bump in the road, do they? A change-up in the Plan. Steady as She goes, that’s the way of it.”

Crowley makes a small, non-committal noise of acknowledgement into his scotch. 

“I’ve been… advised. Forewarned, rather.” Aziraphale raises his glass to his lips. The dark liquid vanishes in a blink. “I’m to be audited.”

Crowley’s stomach does a slow, sour flip-flop. “_No._”

Aziraphale sets his glass down with a miserably certain _thunk_. “Every memo. Every form. Every tick-box. Every _miracle_.” His grey eyes lock onto Crowley’s. “Every. Single. One.”

It feels like he’s been gutted. Like he’s tripped and fallen into another dimension. He rubs his hands over his face, up over the prickle of his hair, ignoring the sharp stinging of his palms. “How far back?”

“_Well_,” says Aziraphale, refilling both their glasses. “That’s the one spot of good news, I suppose. It’s a targeted audit. Just the last fifty years.”

“Targeted.” Crowley’s mind is still reeling, trying to remember everything they’ve done together in that time. Not too much, Arrangement wise. The second half of the twentieth century has so far been clunking along contentedly without much pointed instruction from either of their respective offices. The last big miracle he can even remember Aziraphale pulling was—

The realization hits like a lightning bolt. 

“Oh _fuck_!” He’s on his feet. He doesn’t remember standing. He can feel human eyes turning towards them, questions forming in the pink meat behind them. He repels them sloppily, making the still-hissing stereo squeal. “Fffffucking holy _fuck_, Aziraphale!”

“Oh don’t get so _excited_,” the angel chides. “Your subtraction’s a bit off. That whole mess with the church is—"

“_My_ sssubtraction?” He lets out a shaking laugh and sweeps his arms toward the lighting flickering outside rain-blurred front windows. “_Every_ miracle, Aziraphale? What’s your plan for _this_ one, then?” 

“It’s _fine_,” Aziraphale grumbles, swaying slightly as he leans half out of the booth to make a swipe for the hem of Crowley’s sleeve. “It won’t even be a blip on their radar.”

Crowley backs out of the gently pulling grip, shaking his head. “You miracled a hurricane in the middle of London to, to…” To cover his tracks. To flood Mayfair with so much holy ozone that his own smell so close to a demon’s lair is completely drowned. To make sure nobody is watching or listening or checking in unannounced. And they aren’t. But they _will_. “That’s a bit more than a _blip_.”

“Sit _down_, will you? I’m trying to tell you something.”

The hard ring of angelic command in Aziraphale’s voice shoots straight along Crowley’s spine, making all the crooked places in him go rigid and straight. His first instinct is to kick against it, to hiss and snap and mock and _run_. But Aziraphale is his friend. His oldest, only, dearest friend. 

He sits. Waits. 

Aziraphale clears his throat.

“I was upset. Not really thinking. The Summons, and then the business with the book. You understand.”

Crowley doesn’t understand. 

Aziraphale, damn him, has the nerve to look embarrassed. 

“Have you ever—” he starts. Stops. Clears his throat a second time. “Surely you must have. Wanted things. Things you can’t wrap your head all the way around. Things too big to pull out of nothing. Thought to yourself, _it would just be so much simpler, wouldn’t it be nice if, if…_” 

He trails off again, shoulders rolling in a complicated sort of shrug. He looks ridiculous, with his finger-mussed curls and his drink-pinked cheeks and one loop of his bow-tie larger than the other, dry only because Crowley had the sense to step in and do it for him. Ridiculous and absolutely terrifying. 

“It won’t come up in the audit because it isn’t a miracle.”

Crowley stares at him, all his restless energy evaporating on the spot. All his atoms are screaming at him to freeze, to ball up motionless beneath a low overhang of leaves and wait for the dark, earth-trembling shadow to pass. 

“Aziraphale, you didn’t.”

“I did.”

“That’s so fucking _dangerous._”

“I know.”

“You haven’t got any _control_ over Wishes!”

“I _know_,” Aziraphale sighs. “In my darkest hour, do you honestly think I’d wish for a bit of _rain_?” 

His eyebrows raise as if he’s telling the punchline of a joke. Crowley doesn’t laugh. He looks down at the wedding invitation, still resting innocently beside the almost empty bottle of scotch. 

“What can I do to help?”

Aziraphale leans conspiratorially across the table. The candle gutters in an unfelt wind.

“I need you to _thwart_ me.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I offer this longer chapter as a holdover as the update schedule will be much slower from now until the end of November when I sit my comps exams. If I don't return from the war of academic words, avenge me.

{1}

Crowley rises from the dark, muddy depths of sleep to soft cotton pressed along the length of his body, cool and loose under his slack fingers, warmer and a little damp under his cheek where he’s burrowed into his pillow. Familiar, as is the smell that floods through him with his first conscious breath. Dust and paper and cooling tea and the electric petrichor of Eden before the first storm. 

A more metaphoric cotton fills his mouth. He runs his tongue slowly along the inside of his teeth, searching out the clinging ghost of champagne among the hotsour bloodmetal taste of his own mouth. He remembers, dimly, another taste, similar but distinct. Flesh gold and tart as the skin of a ripe pear and just as tender beneath his teeth. Words pushing into his mouth until he felt like he would burst with them. A hollow ache slowly, exquisitely filled, emptied, and filled again, and again, and again, and…

His hands drift across the cool expanse of sheets, searching, greedy. To his right, the rim of the bed, then cold void beyond. To his left, a rumpled hollow where a body once lay, cool now beneath his fingertips. 

He is alone. 

A low, sorrowful whine worms its way out of his throat. He frets into his pillow, mouth slack, breathing ragged and hot as he sucks at the last dregs of Aziraphale in his bed. If he keeps his eyes closed, if he squeezes them tight enough that the dark blooms holy infrawhite static red against the black, then maybe he can pretend, just for a little longer…

The bed shifts. Dips. Unyielding mass settling onto a plane, drawing him closer with its gravity. A hand combs through his hair, hesitant, before settling feather-soft on the bony crest of his spine where back meets neck. Presses hot and firm as Crowley shudders and writhes beneath it, limbs twisting, tangling, trapped, trembling. Spreads unyielding fingers, smooth nails curling slow into his flesh, releasing, and curling again. Again. And again. 

His breathing slows. His limbs still. He settles.

Settles.

Drifts.

It’s like falling, almost.

It’s like…

_He can see in the dark, but he can’t see here. Static fills his ears. The floor is curved, slick marble. His claws scrabble uselessly for purchase. Something has him by the ankle. Something is pulling pulling pulling him. Closer and closer. The floor dips and tilts and he is slipping over the edge. Falling. He is red red red in the black he is being stretched. Thinner, thinner. He cannot move. He looks up. In the distance, a disk of white. Pulling back at him. Circling. They are two points in a void of dark. Circling, circling, always— _

The glow behind his eyelids is different now. Soft and yellow-warm, shot through with veins of red like the membrane of an egg. 

The dream slips away, forgotten, as his eyelashes flutter open, struggling under the heavy crust of long sleep. He’s curled on his side, limbs folded loosely one on top of the other near the center of his body, hands and feet buzzing faintly with lost circulation. It’s tempting to let his eyes slip shut again, to let that buzzing lap slow, slow over the rest of him until he’s lost once more in sleep’s churning undertow, but there’s a thought that won’t leave him, that pricks and pricks at him, needling him into full wakefulness. 

A dim, golden glow fills his bedroom, haunting the corners with unfamiliar shadows. The shade and shape of the glow is familiar, but its presence here is not. It makes him think of skin, the smooth curve of a bare shoulder, a hand pressed flush against his back, flat and blunt where earlier it had clutched and clawed. 

His eyelids slip closed once more as he slowly uncurls, groaning as his blood pushes back into all the far points of himself. He stretches, cat-like, and rolls onto his belly, limbs flat against the mattress as he takes slow, careful stock of himself. The inside of his mouth is a slaughterhouse. He’s clothed, but only just, his loose vest rucked up to his ribs and silk shorts low on his hips. The long sinewed muscles of his limbs are stiff with exertion not yet fully recovered, and there’s a dull, hollow ache between his legs that sings of something far, far sweeter.

“Hello,” says a soft, dear voice. “Awake at last?”

Crowley opens his eyes. Finds Aziraphale sitting up in his bed, propped against the headboard in a glut of pillows he doesn’t remember buying. He’s wrapped in a long dressing gown, his bare legs stretched out across the duvet and a thin novel open on his lap, white curls haloed gold in the light of a rose-print hurricane lamp Crowley has never seen before. 

Crowley doesn’t blink as he takes in the bared hollow at the base of Aziraphale’s throat, the shape of his ankles crossed one atop the other, the stack of books weighed down by a steaming teacup on the nightstand beside him, a battered Victorian thing of polished, dark-stained wood, curling and ornate in a way that fails to rise to his own standards of opulence. There’s a story here, but his brain is struggling to piece it together. Crowley feels sluggish, heavy. Weary, despite being newly woken.

How long has he been sleeping?

“Wha’ day issit?” he croaks, voice rough with disuse.

Aziraphale smiles at him fondly and tucks his thumb into the novel’s spine. “Tuesday,” he says. “You didn’t sleep _that_ long.”

It takes a long, muddled moment for Crowley to puzzle through the implied timeline. 

“_Nggggk_. Felt like a year, at least.”

“Mm.” The hand not holding Aziraphale’s place reaches down to tangle comfortably with Crowley’s. “Sounds rather lonely.”

Crowley turns his face further into the pillow, trying to bury his flush as Aziraphale’s thumb brushes light across his knuckles. 

“You didn’t have to stay, you know.”

Aziraphale draws Crowley’s hand up to his mouth. Kisses it, slow and firm. “None of that, now.”

Damp heat flares up from Crowley’s chest. He wants to pull his hand away from the too-soft brush of Azirphale’s breath. Wants to push it closer, slip his slim fingers past the dry swell of his lips to the wet heat beyond. He trembles, caught and stretched thin somewhere halfway between the competing gravities of his instincts, and stares with hot, unblinking eyes as Aziraphale shifts his grip, turning their intertwined hands to expose the dark veins along Crowley’s wrist.

“I would like very much,” Aziraphale rumbles, breath warm and wet against his fluttering pulse point, “to kiss you good morning.” He pauses, head cocked. Grey eyes lift briefly to the heavens as he purses his lips in thought. “Or good afternoon, to be more precise.”

Crowley’s fingers clench, spasm. He forces them open again, stretching, reaching, body twisting as he rolls to welcome Aziraphale into his open arms. The angel folds into him with a sigh like a summer’s breeze, his mouth open and soft as prayer against his own. 

Aziraphale kisses Crowley like they’ve been kissing for a thousand years. 

Crowley groans into him, wounded. Aziraphale answers with a sound from deep in his chest that hums like sweet music deep into Crowley’s lungs. It feels like cheating, it being this easy. Aziraphale pushes into him, sucking at the bow of his upper lip, teeth catching and nipping as they gasp together. Sunday morning they were wearing each other’s skins, facing their executions. Saturday morning they were tearing into each other with sharp words, flaying each other bloodlessly. And now…

They twist like snakes, Aziraphale pulling him close and rolling until Crowley is pinned beneath him in the middle of the bed, bodies flush sternum to thigh. Crowley’s slim legs fall open to give him room, and Aziraphale slots between them with a low, contented sigh, the soft curve of his belly fitting neatly against the hollow of his own. The ache low in Crowley’s pelvis pulses slow and slick as Aziraphale’s mouth drifts lazily along the hard bone of his jaw to suckle and worry at the thin, soft skin tucked beneath. He stares dizzily up at the ceiling, breath quick in his throat, but the golden, hazy boundary between light and dark offers no answers. 

“Isssit really Tuesday?”

Aziraphale’s affirmative hum rumbles deep in his chest. “Really really.”

Crowley laughs, high and a little hysterical. 

Aziraphale pushes himself up onto his elbows, curls a riot and eyebrows furrowed. One corner of his mouth pulls back in an odd half-smile, a thin strand of their mingled spit dangling off his lower lip. “What’s so funny?”

Crowley shakes his head, presses the heal of his hand over his mouth, his eyes. The hitching bursts of giggles don’t fade.

“What the fuck do people _do_ on Tuesdays?”

Aziraphale’s eyes go very round, as if he, too, is suddenly looking back on eleven years of counting downwards. Eleven years of routine abandoned in frantic preparation for the end. “Oh, I’m entirely the wrong person to ask.”

Crowley’s chest heaves, hiccupping laughter threatening to tip into panic. “What do _we_ do on Tuesdays?” he asks, higher than he intended, fine cracks spreading along the edge of the words.

Aziraphale kisses him, then. Doesn’t stop kissing him until the high, fluttering feeling in Crowley’s chest settles, until he’s firm again in his corporeal form. 

“Whatever we want,” he gasps against the sharp arch of his cheekbone. “Oh Crowley, my dear, anything, _anything, _whatever you…” His hips roll into him, hard and trembling, then shy away. Crowley can feel the flushed, taut ache of his wanting as he struggles to hold still and steady, hesitation banking the fire of his desire. A question in want of an answer. A hand outheld, open but soft, fingers smoothed and curled and ready to take denial if that is what they are handed. 

A rough, ragged noise tears out of Crowley’s throat. His hips cant up to meet Aziraphale in fierce, singing welcome, teeth sharp as they nip at the crest of the angel’s brow, the cool shell of his ear, arms tight around his chest and _squeezing_ until Aziraphale rewards him with another low, guttural moan. 

They don’t find out what people do on Tuesdays. Or Wednesdays, for that matter. 

On Thursday, Aziraphale insists he’ll _wilt_, dear boy, if he doesn’t eat something more substantial than the luxuriously meager contents of Crowley’s fridge. They dress, Crowley doing his best not to stare as Aziraphale retrieves his trousers, shirt, and waistcoat from an antique valet that’s somehow found its way into the corner of his bedroom, but his eyes keep getting stuck on the swift, sure movements of the angel’s thick fingers as he does up his buttons and whisks his bowtie around his throat. 

His own slim hands dance indecisively over the wooden hangers in his rarely used closet, too restless to pull something from the ether. He feels scattered, adrift, a dinghy cast off in high seas. Selfish of him, really, after two days of near constant physical contact. 

He finds his quilted blazer, hung up neat near the shadowed back, collar flared to show off the sliver of red around the neck, but the moment his hands brush across it sour smoke seems to fill his nostrils. He jerks as if burned and makes a blind grab for the hanger next to it, then a set of trousers, then a top, sliding the closet door shut again with a flicker of thought.

One good thing about dressing almost exclusively in black: it’s very hard not to match. 

“Very nice,” murmurs Aziraphale, taking in the deep plunge of his open neckline, baring the glint of his silver necklace low on his sternum. He reaches out to tweak the red line of his pocket square, fingers following the long lines of his lapel to his waist before slipping ever so briefly _in_ to brush his thumb along the blazer’s dark silk lining. 

Maybe Crowley’s urge to _keep touching_ isn’t so selfish after all. “For you, angel, only the nicest,” he says, slipping his sunglasses on with a wink. 

All his bravado evaporates the moment they step out of the lobby. It’s always a bit of a shock, stepping from the dim, rigid quiet of his flat out into human world. A shock, but an enjoyable one, most days. He likes humans. Likes how loud and messy they are, how tangled-up and impassioned and cocksure of their place in the cosmos. How seriously they take their brief, petty, little lives. How predictable they are, how surprising, how silly and clever and kind and fierce and achingly, achingly human. 

Most days. Not today.

It’s late in the morning, late enough that the first wave of fashionable lunch-goers has started to crowd along the tourists jostling down the sidewalk. Taxis and mopeds rush past in a cacophony of engine exhaust and roaring tires. Someone keeping pace with them a dozen feet behind is listening to music on their phone without earbuds. A car horn, then another, then another. A dog strains at its leash, barking at another dog that dares to walk on the opposite side of the street. A baby’s cry from a flat somewhere above. Two suited men arguing politics in loud, boisterous voices even as they walk in stride. A huddle of tourists murmuring contentedly to one another in a language he half-understands. A wild-eyed figure on a street corner waving an armful of neon pamphlets proclaiming the end times. 

After three hundred some odd years’ residence the press of the city should feel like a warm blanket, but today it snares tight around him like a garrote. 

Hands that have spent two days anchored in the safe depths of Aziraphale’s flesh feel fluttery and too-light. He jams them as deep as he can into the shallow dip of his front pockets, shoulders rigid as Aziraphale falls into easy step at his side, hands clasped loosely behind his back. 

The street is blindingly bright compared to the dark grey comfort of his flat, the late morning sun glittering supernova white off the concrete and glass of the surrounding buildings. Crowley finds himself squinting despite his dark glasses, small flashes of white light bursting across his vision each time he tries to tilt his gaze level with the hazy, dark-socketed eyeline of the humans passing them, the shimmering horizon beyond. He feels light-headed and yet oddly heavy, like something has a hold of him by the scruff of the neck, squeezing and pushing his head forward and into his chest, shaking him roughly when he tries to resist. It’s easier to keep his eyes on the sidewalk, his focus on the interweaving pattern of his meandering steps alongside the quick and precise march of Aziraphale’s brown oxfords.

_Don’t look_, whispers a little voice as they pass a work crew of painters in light overalls. _They’ll stay human if you don’t look._

He marches forward blindly, head down, breathing heavy through his nose. Nobody’s watching them, he can _feel_ it, their mortal attentions sliding off the buzzing threat of his aura like their patch of sidewalk simply doesn’t exist. It doesn’t stop him form seeing, or _thinking_ he’s seeing, familiar faces at the edge of his vision. A flash of shining teeth. Flecks of gold on a cheek uncreased by laugh-lines. Eyes black and hopeless as the bottom of a well.

He presses closer to Aziraphale. Not close enough to crowd him over, just enough that their shoulders brush with every second or third step. It was one thing to wind their fingers together in the safe cavern of his sheets, but out here, beneath an open, cloudless sky, the thought burns him. Somebody could be watching. Above. Below. Somebody smart and skeptical. Somebody with the patience to mull over every touch, every brush of skin against skin, every meaningful glance and burst of laughter at a secret joke until they realize…

They come to a crosswalk. The light is against them, the traffic on the road too heavy to launch themselves off the curb and trust their safety in faith alone. Crowley sways as they come to a stop, shoulders hunching tighter around his ears as more pedestrians crowd against them. He can feel Aziraphale sneaking little glances at him. Crowley’s shoulders hitch half a centimeter higher as a siren wails unseen down the next block and Aziraphale makes a small, open noise low in his throat, like understanding.

The crossing light turns green. Aziraphale, ridiculously, offers him his right arm.

“My dear,” he says, poise unwavering even as the grumbling press of humanity is forced to part around him, a boulder set firm in the middle of a gurgling stream. 

Crowley hesitates. As the crossing light starts to flash a warning countdown, he worms his left hand out of his pocket and winds it tight around Aziraphale’s elbow. Doesn’t let go even when they’ve reached the other side. 

Aziraphale beams at him.

“There’s a new café, just next to the park. A little French place I spotted on my walk the other week. I’ve been meaning to try it but with, well, _you know_…” 

He steers them along the eastern rim of Hyde Park and down a side street. Crowley does his best not to grimace when he catches sight of their destination. The antiqued plaster exterior, red and green striped awning, and rattan chairs huddled close to the chalkboard studded front windows are almost garish in their twee adherence to the French aesthetic, but there’s a promising smell of baked bread and a pair of sloppily-trimmed boxwoods standing guard at the door. The hostess starts to lead them to a two-top near the front window, but with a wave of Aziraphale’s hand she abruptly changes course and leads them to a table snug against a wall near the back, right behind a vine-covered privacy screen that’s suspiciously at odds with the rest of the decor.

Aziraphale pulls out a Crowley’s chair for him, the one closest to the wall, angled so he can lean over to peer around the screen at the rest of the restaurant if he wants to, but otherwise remain hidden. Positions himself in the adjoining seat, his body an extension of the ivy’s shielding. The table is quiet, hushed, despite their proximity to the kitchen. If the hostess notices anything amiss she doesn’t blink.

As she leaves, the angel leans over, hand brushing lightly along Crowley’s sleeve. “Is this all right?”

“It’ssss _fine,_” Crowley mumbles into the glass of pinot gris that’s suddenly appeared on their table. He can feel Aziraphale’s slight frown as he watches him tip the glass back and let the wine slip untasted down his throat, but when he settles the empty glass back on the table there’s an unstopped bottle he didn’t conjure waiting in Aziraphale’s hands. The angel refills his glass and doesn’t comment on the way Crowley’s fingers tremble around the stem. 

Crowley bites his tongue and hides his attention in the menu. Struggles to get his breathing under his control as the letters squirm illegibly across the page. Why is he like this? Nothing has even _happened_. He was fine, he’s _been_ fine for two days and now…

Aziraphale bumps his knee against his under the table. Keeps it pressed there, warm and steady. By the time their server arrives, Crowley is halfway through the bottle, his breathing measured and even. He orders without hissing once. 

Crowley’s slice of quiche is passible, in that he takes two bites before passing the rest wordlessly to Aziraphale, who takes an experimental mouthful of his own before regretfully declaring Crowley’s silent critique sound. 

“The risk one runs when trying new things,” he sighs, dabbing delicately at his mouth. “At least the company is enchanting.”

Their fruit plate is equally bland, anemic slices of melon and apple punctuated by a scattering of tropical ornaments that provide more color than flavor. Aziraphale’s croissant appears far less objectionable, however—thick golden flakes of parting crust parting to reveal a steaming, silversnow heart. Crowley eyes it suspiciously.

“Sure you didn’t snag that from some little _pâtisserie_ on Rue Yves Toudic?” he asks, sucking sourly on a watery slice of kiwi.

Aziraphale blinks at him in serene, dumb innocence, red tongue darting to catch a crumb from the traitorously coy corner of his mouth. 

The sun is still burning late-August bright when they leave. Aziraphale doesn’t give Crowley’s hands a chance to falter, linking their arms as soon as they step onto the sidewalk. Crowley offers a perfunctory grumbled protest but makes no move to free himself from the light hold. A sluggish breeze ruffles warm through his hair, and Crowley tilts his head back to feel it around his bared neck, surprised when he can look up at the swaying treetops rimming Hyde Park without feeling like he’s falling off a cliff. Even if some of the faces of the people they pass still have a soft, blurred quality to them.

Crowley sucks in a long, deep breath. Blows it out again. 

The world turns on and on, unburnt.

Aziraphale pauses at the corner, allowing Crowley the choice to pivot their steps back towards the flat, but Crowley presses them both onward, across the street and into the park’s canopied labyrinth. 

He likes Hyde Park. Likes it even better with Aziraphale at his side. Sure he’d napped through a lot of its high points—he regrets not seeing the Crystal Palace with Aziraphale at the peak of the Great Exhibition, has no regrets whatsoever about skiving off for Victoria’s Golden Jubilee—but it’s the park’s smaller charms that stick closest to him. The bend and dip of the long grasses flanking the central lake. The hard-pack press of the earth beneath his feet between the carefully spaced trees. A field of humans of all shapes and sizes lounging like sunflowers in carefully-angled deck chairs. People and green things as far as the eye can see, living and oblivious to the magnitude of their recent near miss. 

Had the two of them ever strolled so casually along the bank of the Serpentine? Ever let themselves forget, if only for half an afternoon, the gulf of damnation between them? Crowley frowns. Surely he’d remember, the two of them side by side in knee stockings and stiff collars or tophats and long coats or Aziraphale stuck forever in his Victorian suits while Crowley flashed through the increasingly rapid changes in modern fashion, but when he tries to sift truth from embarrassed, fevered fantasy it all seems to slip through his fingers. 

“The gentleman used to walk on the right, remember? Keep the old sword arm free.”

Aziraphale shoots him a mischievous, sideways glance, one brow raised. “We can switch, if you prefer. I’ve seen you be a gentleman before.”

“_Slander_,” Crowley hisses, grin splitting his cheeks until they ache.

The path branches before them, left and right. Again Aziraphale discretely slows his steps, allowing Crowley to guide their journey. Crowley feels warm, still pleasantly buzzed from the wine. He pulls them to the right, intending to loop back along the northern rim of the park, only to pause as he catches sight of something familiar and yet completely alien looming just above the skyline to the south. 

“Has that always been there?”

Aziraphale cranes to look over his shoulder. “Royal Albert Hall? Of course. We went there to see—” 

“No, no, I mean the…” He flaps his hand vaguely. “Greeny-bronze dome thing. Looming just off to the left. Little round bit on top. It looks familiar, just not familiar _here_.”

Aziraphale squints into the distance. “Huh,” he says after a long moment. “Well that is odd.”

Sudden alterations to their local geography warrant further investigation. They leave the garden and wind their way south, where they eventually find themselves standing in front of the pale-columned face of London’s Science Museum, the green patina-ed dome perched atop it like a hat. 

“It’s the planetarium,” Crowley realizes with a start. “The one that got swallowed by Madame Tussads.”

“Good lord you’re right.” Aziraphale blinks up at it, hand raised to shield the mid-afternoon sun from his eyes. “Whatever do you suppose it’s doing here?”

Crowley is at a loss. Nanny Ashtoreth is not. “What good is a science museum if it hasn’t got a planetarium?”. 

Aziraphale’s face is creased with the same closed, calculating expression he wears when working through a particularly stubborn stretch of Akkadian. “I’ve heard rumors,” he says. “That on Thursdays, sometimes people go to museums.”

“On Thursdays,” Crowley echoes.

“If you can imagine such a thing.”

He can. So they do. 

Aziraphale releases his arm just long enough to get the door. They’re nearly separated again by a squirming hoard of school-age children herded by a pair of harried looking twenty-somethings in matching polos. Crowley doesn’t envy them in their task ahead. The Science Museum is the sort of museum beloved by eleven-year-olds and anyone who was once eleven. The museum’s main gallery is open at the center, allowing tantalizing glimpses of the floors above. Natural light streams through the arched glass roof, glinting softly off steam engines and rocket boosters and an immense white ring suspended sideways between the floors flashing fleeting messages in red 8-bit letters.

“Oh no!” moans Aziraphale, catching sight of oversized, vintage machinery around a corner, much of it car-shaped. “How will I ever get you home again?”

Crowley only laughs and drags him deeper into the exhibits.

They wind their way through the floors slowly, relishing in the luxurious jumble of human _things_ and informative placards. Aziraphale is particularly taken by the dull, battered bronze of the Apollo 10 command capsule.

“Marvelous,” he breaths. “To think they went all the way to the moon in something as small and simple as that.”

Crowley digs an elbow teasingly into the angel’s side. “See what happens when you give up on a whole field of study just as it’s getting good?”

Aziraphale doesn’t answer for a long minute, gaze fixed on long streaks of black char burned into the metal by reentry. “Do you know how long it was, between my first book and my second? My first proper bound book I could call my _own_, I mean. Not a scroll or a tablet, and not shared with a monastery, or loaned from the shelf of a lord. Something I could keep for my own leisure without writing it up in an expense report.”

Crowley chews fretfully at his lip. “No.”

“Twelve years,” Aziraphale sighs. “And I only managed that because the first had made me so terribly greedy and, I’m embarrassed to say, a tad single-minded. There was time, then, to really chew ideas over. ‘_Worlds enough and time,’ _you could say. I’ll admit I was never satisfied by it, was always hungry for more, but there was some relief to the chewing. The mulling. The going away and coming back and, and the _dissecting_. The picking apart of good bits from bad. And then…” 

Crowley closes his eyes behind his glasses. Lets himself remember Aziraphale bent over a single candle in his tiny stone room at the abbey, a thick tome open on the wooden table before him, one thumb tracing back and forth along the fringe of that that terrible gold-trimmed shawl he wore until it was completely worn through at the shoulders, a Renaissance painting before there was even the dream of a Renaissance, framed and slightly warped by the arched glass of his window, Crowley lurking outside, his face pressed as close to the consecrated ground as he dared.

“Well. The books just kept coming and coming, didn’t they? The ideas. They’re so _awfully_ clever, humans, just absolutely silly with it. All that—” He flits his hand through the air. “_Fantasy. _And philosophy. Politics and poetry and—oh!—it was all coming so terribly _fast_, dear. And I felt so, so _thin_. Stretched out, like—”

“Like you were burning,” Crowley interjects, before he has the sense to swallow the words back down where they belong. “Burning out hollow from the inside.”

“That’s a good way to put it, yes.” Aziraphale furrows his brow, lost in thought. “I was sorry to let them go,” he adds after a long moment, so quiet might have been talking to himself. “I’m afraid I might never catch up again.” 

Crowley swallows. Holds himself absolutely, resolutely still. 

They can be dangerous things, metaphors. 

“Do you still feel that same way? That it’s all going too fast?”

“_No_,” comes Aziraphale’s answer, so swift and sure and that it almost takes Crowley out at the knees. “No, not in the slightest. If anything, looking back with the full force and clarity of hindsight, I realize that if I’d been less foolhardy, less afraid of getting a proper _running start_…” He trails off. Sucks in a long breath, blows it out again. “Maybe I wouldn’t have cheated us both out of so many years.”

Crowley doesn’t speak for a long time, and Aziraphale doesn’t press his silence. They walk quietly through the rest of Exploring Space and Making the Modern World, then up to the Information Ag and the hall of Measuring Time. As they gaze at the prototype of the 10,000 year-sure Clock of the Long Now, Aziraphale’s free hand reaches over to close loosely over Crowley’s where it’s tangled tight in the folds of fabric at his elbow. Crowley’s iron grip falters, shies, hand slipping down the length of Aziraphale’s sleeve, down, down to where Aziraphale is waiting for him, palm open and smooth. They tangle their fingers together, the public skin-to-skin contact burning up the gangly length of Crowley’s arm to settle hot in his throat and cheeks. 

They eventually find their way to the museum’s top floor, where the exhibits are punctuated by long, colorful banners advertising the planetarium itself. The retired professional in Crowley is pleased to see that admittance costs extra. 

Aziraphale examines the schedule of show listings with an intensity he usually reserves for wine lists. “_Through the Black Hole_. What an evocative title.”

“That one’s already started,” drawls the bored woman manning the ticket counter. “Next available seating is _Our Place in the Universe_.”

Aziraphale turns to Crowley, eyebrows raised in question. Crowley shrugs. 

“Sounds like a lark,” he says, and pays for two tickets. 

They have twenty minutes until the show starts, so they wander off to the adjoining special exhibit on gravity. Adam’s influence is very strong here. Most of the exhibits light up or make noise, and there’s significant emphasis placed on learning through touching and poking. The same group of children that barreled into them in the lobby is crowded around a large, waist-high circle in the middle of the room with blue fabric drawn taught across it like a tambourine. Like a _tramp_oline, Crowley corrects, watching the museum guide place a fist-sized metal weight painted like a cartoon sun somewhere near the middle, where it sinks deep into the spandex, pulling at the points of the cartoon stars printed on the fabric of space-time until their shape is stretched and distorted. 

He and Aziraphale both have a good laugh at the remarkably unflattering portrait of Newton and his apocryphal apple. The more technical display on the gravitational forces at play in the origins of the universe is more eerily spot-on than either of them would care to admit, though the metaphor does start to unravel as the humans try to work their way through the ultimate end of things.

“A Big Crunch,” says Aziraphale, clucking his tongue. “_Really_.” Crowley forces a snort, but can’t stop himself from looking back over to the gaggle of kids huddled around the stretched-cloth model of space- time, crowding and giggling as they roll marble after marble in long, elliptical orbits that wind in ever-tightening spirals until the glass planets crash headlong into the metal sun. 

His mood picks back up once they’re in the planetarium itself. The last time he and Aziraphale went to the cinema together was to see _The Ten Commandments_, and they’d spent most of that one three sheets to the wind and pissing themselves over Charlton Heston’s beard. There’s no popcorn or cigarette girls to compliment his sudden surge of nostalgia, but it’s more than a fair trade off to see Aziraphale struggle not to be swallowed whole by the latest in fully-reclining cinematic comfort. 

They’re far from alone, but they might as well be when the lights go out, plunging the round theater into space black. Soon enough the screen is scattered with stars—clearer and brighter than any he’s seen since the advent of coal-burning stoves. Aziraphale gasps at his side, and Crowley smiles. It’s an illusion, obviously, a projection of electric light, less dazzling than the endless arch of sky on the cloudless planes of the Serengeti, but a good effect nevertheless. 

The narration is regrettably dull, the sound mix a hair too loud for comfort, so he tunes it out in favor of picking out familiar shapes and patterns in the sky field. He jumps slightly when Aziraphale’s hand suddenly seizes his own as the camera tilts and pans, the stars swirling dizzyingly until they are no longer looking up but down, the Earth a round, blue and green jewel on a diamond-studded stretch of dark velvet. 

A wave of unidentifiable feeling crashes over Crowley as he gazes at his mortal home. Judging by the crushing strength of Aziraphale’s grip, the angel feels it, too. 

They did it. They actually _did it_. Against all odds, against the full forces of Heaven and Hell, they managed the impossible. By skill or luck or ineffable divine will, they’re here together, after the intended end of all things, holding hands in the dark in a sea of humanity, united in awe over how beautiful, how small and precariously perfect the planet is, how fortunate they are to be here together, in this moment, on its long and wandering journey through the cosmos.

His burst of euphoria slowly quiets as the camera pulls back, showing the moon in its orbit and back further to encompass the Earth circling round and round the sun. Then further back, beyond the red swell of Mars and rocky chaos of the asteroid belt, zooming with increased speed past the gas giants and a stray comet and Pluto’s lonely march along the Kuiper belt and out until they’re looking back at the whole of the solar system, the sun itself a gleam of gold no bigger than a fist, shrinking, dimming, and finally lost as they rise through the icy planetesimals of the Oort cloud. 

Crowley’s tongue curls in his mouth. He shifts restlessly in his seat. Overhead is studded silverwhite film of the Local Interstellar Cloud, then the Local Bubble, then the long, arching branch of the Orion Arm. He glances at Aziraphale, staring upward, enraptured, at the whole of the Milky Way galaxy, the cold silver points of deep space glimmering white across his grey irises. Crowley squirms, suddenly too-aware of his bones, the sharp, double-jointed places where his corporeal form struggles to fit him. His breath is heavy, ragged. He tries to calm it, tries to lose himself like Aziraphale as their galaxy’s spiraled arms blur one into another with distance, shrinking into a darkness that is suddenly alight with countless glowing spinning disks in sickly pastels.

An icy, itching feeling spreads up his serpent spine, out across his skin. Sinks heavy into his bones.

He can’t feel his hands. 

A sound, low and close, quieter than the booming soundtrack but cutting infinitely deeper. Two syllables that might be his name break against the taught membrane of his eardrum. Distant pressure on one of his upper limbs as the sounds repeat, the second syllable raised now in a question. 

He stares, unblinking, frozen, as galaxies small and squirming as animacules in a drop of water condense into a single flashflare point of light that is instantly swallowed by the retreating void, black on black on black lightening suddenly to grey, then white, the fog lit intermittently within by long static streaks of lightning until it, too, falls far beyond reach, a colorless hum of energy at the far end of an echoing tunnel. 

A pause, like the weightless moment just as the lift drops, the thin band of air at the top of a thermal that refuses to carry flight any higher. 

It’s cold here.

Very, very cold. 

The distant, bright point of light grows closer, larger. Larger and larger and larger, breaking into a hundred, then a thousand, then a hundred thousand million burning points of fire in the screaming infrablack. 

Millions of light years pass in an instant, rushing by too fast to catch or make sense of, but what’s a hundred million years in a boiling sea billions and billions wide? 

Xe burns, tumbles, xeir mouth open in a scream but nothing comes out, there is nothing inside _to_ come out, all Her blistering greengold radiance ripped out and scattered behind xem in a redsilver comet tail and _everything _is coming all at once from all directions bigger and closer and faster and _faster_ until—


End file.
